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Measurement of inbreeding

Posted by, iwdb_super on June 2, 2016

How do we measure inbreeding? For many years, the Coefficient of Inbreeding (COI) has been used as a measure for how inbred a dog is. COI is not without it faults, though. First of all, it only gives a number on how likely it is that offspring will inherit the same gene-combination from both the sire’s and dam’s side. Don’t misunderstand, it’s good to know how likely this is. But it really says nothing about the genetic diversity in the dog’s background. Because of this, we’ve chosen to also include ancestor-loss values. This is a better tool to see how many dogs are in a given dog’s pedigree, and thus how genetically diverse the dog is likely to be.

In the future we may add other measures of diversity as well. A common tool among researchers is the mean kinship values. We do find it quite hard to understand, and values aren’t easily interpreted.

We would also love to create a tool where you could trace a dog’s ancestry all the way back to the breed’s founders and see how the different lines are mixed. That will have to wait for a later version of iwdb, though. The same goes for a tool which will allow you to find dogs without a given individual in their pedigree. It would be useful, but will have to wait until a later date.